Getting the quick wins!

How often is it that companies talk about quick wins, and then the project schedule shows 3-4 months before the first quick win can be realized in a production environment?   When it comes to ITSM projects – this is certainly not uncommon.  Defining your ITIL processes that align it to the capability of the underlying ITSM technology and business so often involves a significant amount of over-engineering and analysis paralysis – sometimes with good outcome, but mostly, just wasted time and effort that could’ve been spent doing something more productive.

As much as I’d like to attribute the ability to shorten project life-cycles and getting the quick wins to a technology choice (which certainly can assist), it really all boils down to a company’s culture, processes, the type of leaders, managers and the commitment to getting things done (GTD) within an organization.  Don’t forget that the same culture, leadership style, etc should also be reflected in the supplier organization culture so that gains made by one aren’t lost by the other. So how can using an efficient, simple and easy to use solution such as ServiceNow make a difference if your organization is prone to over-analyzing and procrastinating on everything?  Well the good news is, when you start the actual implementation, you won’t waste any more time.  The bad news is, the rest of the process is still going to be long and painful, and hopefully you’re not stuck in having to deal with this type of organization daily. But what if you are…

How do you change this type of culture? The answer is simple – but a lot of patience and persistence is required….   It happens one step at a time!   Start by demonstrating your own commitment to the culture change and how that change will benefit the organization if everyone adopts the same attitude.   In other words – focus on the quick wins, and do everything in your power to make them QUICK WINS – and then market the success of those quick wins, the benefits, and what’s needed to repeat the process on the next project.

I wish you the best of luck.

Bruce

Addressing your ITSM needs

We’ve been very busy in recent months finding innovative cost-cutting ways to help customers derive more value from their IT Service Management processes and disciplines.

Some key (and probably very obvious) drivers for our customers have been:

1. Reduce direct vendor costs (software licenses and maintenance costs)
2. Faster time-to-market for new features and benefits
3. Reduce implementation time & cost
4. Improve service quality
5. Improve alignment of Service Delivery team to the Business

To achieve these we’ve had to overcome a few key challenges:

Legacy Challenge #1: Cost & Complexity

The legacy ITSM solutions are about as cumbersome and complex as the typical organizational specific ITSM processes and workflows themselves.   Granted the legacy vendors are trying really hard to re-invent the front-end usability, ease of implementation, etc, but there’s no way they can just overhaul a complex ITSM product overnight.  It’s a bit like trying to change the wheels on a moving vehicle.   The challenge with using these legacy solutions [as powerful as they may be] is that the license, maintenance and implementation costs are prohibitive for smaller organizations.  Even large organizations – especially in the current economic climate – are desperately looking for innovative ways to reduce costs while improving their service delivery capability and quality.

Our Solution:  Change the underlying technology.   Service-now.com is a web2.0 [modern] solution, built from the ground up, is cloud based [no more operational babysitting and system administration nightmares], and was designed with ease of use and implementation as a fundamental guiding principle.  This means we can design, build and test the ITSM solution in third of the time of what we traditionally could and did.

The Benefit:  Reduced cost and complexity – and significantly so.  Our Service-now.com customers are ecstatic with their choice of technology and our ability to deliver.  Once delivered, the administrative overheads are substantially reduced and the fact that Service-now.com is offered through the cloud, means that the painful and costly exercise of upgrading and remaining current evaporates into thin air [excuse the pun].   I always used to maintain that technology is “just technology” and no one technology can make a huge difference… well I’ve been proven wrong.  I was actually astonished as to how big an impact the changing of an underlying technology can have on the key drivers listed above.

 

Legacy Challenge #2:  Engineers & Consultants

We “grew up” in an industry where organizations relied on consultants to help define their ITSM processes (and requirements) while an independent reseller or systems integrated implemented the ITSM solution.  There appears to be increasing frustration with misalignment between the perfect [often over-engineered] ITSM processes, the business needs and what the technology is able to deliver within a reasonable time.  To avoid this misalignment, a more inclusive consultancy approach to solution delivery has become paramount.

Our Solution:   Our delivery teams increasingly rely on experienced ITSM solution experts, business analysts and consultants that understands the underlying solution capabilities.  This means we guide the customer through a design process using a far more pragmatic approach.   Our experienced business analysts and consultants work together to engage [interrogate] the business users and capture the true business requirements.   They either design or assist in the design of the customer’s processes and ensure that the user and business requirements are converted into well defined technical delivery requirements.

The Benefit:  Our customers are now getting more value from the process design through to implementation.  Our pragmatic approach means the processes are designed to bring simplicity, ease of use, achievable results and are quick to implement, directly achieving many of the key drivers identified above.

 

When next faced with questions on your improvement strategy, you should be considering a lot more than simply how to improve current processes.  By using an innovative solution like  Service-now.com and an agile implementation/consultancy partner such as Marutech, you’d be surprised how easily you can swop out the underlying legacy technology AND improve your processes for less than what you would have spent on your next big upgrade.

CloudWashing – a recurring topic

I can’t tell how many times I’ve read articles and blog posts about the differences between legacy vendors and “true” cloud vendors.

Legacy vendors tend to hop on the cloud bandwagon by simply hosting their legacy applications and then [sometimes] building some fancy wrapping and automation around it.  And then there are those that think because they’ve hosted their application on some virtual infrastructure (aka VMWare or other), that they now have a pure cloud offering?  (They even believe it themselves)

On the other side, [true] cloud vendors do things differently by taking the time to build their solutions from scratch.  They tend to use modern technology and programming techniques and most importantly, the tend to focus on the ease of use for the end-user.  The more modern paradigm is what cloud computing and Software as a Service is really about, but few of these new and small startups or vendors have the marketing budget to compete with the large legacy vendors that have managed to white-wash the cloud paradigm [or is it brain-wash their clients?] with a “hosting is also cloud computing” idea.  True cloud vendor’s products are simply better suited to the 21st century – they’re simpler to use, quicker to implement and give you better bang for your buck almost every time.

All the early adopters and thought leaders out there will know what I’m talking about…  The rest, well, I suppose we’ll see you onboard [or is that enlightened?] sometime in the future…  perhaps just in time to get confused by the next big thing.

 

Going Cloud… Thinking Security (part 2)

This series reviews 4 ‘things’ you should take seriously when considering cloud solutions.  Part 1 looked briefly at Application Integration – critical if your cloud solution needs to form part of an integrated IT strategy.

Now, we look at security.

Even though we have written about and discussed security a number of times it is still of extreme relevance and importance in the move to a cloud based service.

Most security consultants have had to deal with a huge shift in focus regarding security, but the basic security fundamentals for users of cloud services still apply. As a first step, assessing the risk in security and compliance is imperative. Core security topics such as control and manageability, tracking records of actions, trust and incident management, liability and support, misuse and data leakage, these are all more critical than ever.

According to Nico Popp, VP of product development at Verisign “This requires layers of security, including multifactor authentication, identity brokers, access management and, in some cases, an external service provider who can provide that high a level of administrative control”

“Security and cloud hosting are two separate things, but the cost of entry is so low, and often so simple, that customers may not do as much due diligence as they should to find out who’s responsible for security,” says Ezra Gottheil an analyst who covers server issues for Technology Business Research.

Too many times companies assume that their cloud provider is taking care of security – leaving themselves vulnerable to attack, and all too often, ignorant of the fact.

Customers must demand transparency, avoid vendors that refuse to provide detailed information on security programs. Ask questions related to the qualifications of policy makers, architects, risk-control processes and technical mechanisms and the level of testing that’s been done to verify that service and control processes are functioning as intended, and that vendors can identify unanticipated vulnerabilities.

Here are seven of the specific security issues Gartner says customers should raise with vendors before selecting a cloud vendor.

1. Privileged user access

Get as much information as you can about the people who manage your data. Ask providers to supply information on the hiring and oversight of privileged administrators, and the controls over their access.

2. Regulatory compliance

Traditional service providers are subjected to external audits and security certifications. Cloud computing providers who refuse to undergo this type of scrutiny must only be used for the most trivial functions.

3. Data location

Ask providers where your data will be stored, and if this data centre has sufficient security measures in place to obey local privacy requirements on behalf of their customers.

4. Data segregation

The cloud provider should provide evidence that encryption schemes were designed and tested by experienced specialists to ensure data integrity.

5. Recovery

Even if you don’t know where your data is, a cloud provider should tell you what will happen to your data and service in case of a disaster.

6. Investigative support.

The vendor needs to assure you that they can investigating inappropriate activity and must show that they have already successfully supported such activities.

7. Long-term viability

Ideally, your cloud computing provider will never go broke or get acquired and swallowed up by a larger company. But you must be sure your data will remain available even after such an event.

Remember we need to qualify the vendors we want to do business with, that is why Marutech and Cornastone have invested a considerable amount of time to cut through all the hype and get to the point. To ensure that our customers know full well that the solutions in our stable really do meet the above requirements.

In the next article we look at storage, which continues to be one of the weak points of many a provider.

Going Cloud… Thinking App Integration (part 1)

As many new and upcoming markets are drifting away from the norm of IT, Cloud based services are continuing to grow and grow fairly quickly in the market place, according to IDC’s Cloud Services Overview Report “Sales of Cloud-related technologies are growing at an average of 26 percent a year”.

That is roughly six times the rate of IT spending overall, the report goes on to state that in 2009 estimated spending on cloud technologies was just over US $17 billion and will grow to a whopping US$44 billion by 2013.

So as you start to review your future IT budget and prepare for the move to cloud based services, there are 4 critical elements to understanding the true value of the service being offered – Application Integration, Security, Storage and Virtual I/O.

In today’s article – we touch on Application Integration.

A number of companies have already invested a considerable amount of money into solutions that can assist in managing their network and platform infrastructure, these solutions are an integral part of your business and should not be ignored when moving to a Cloud based Solution.

The complexities involved in implementing a solution and ensuring that your current products’ potential is maximized requires integration.  We spend considerable effort in ensuring that our cloud based offerings, like Service-now.com can support the integrations required to tap this potential, and as leading systems integrators in our field, we provide the necessary skills and resources to make the integration between systems seamless.

Integration means more than just batch-processing chunks of data being traded between applications once or twice per day the way that was done on mainframes, according to Tom Fisher, vice president of cloud computing at SuccessFactors.com, a business-application SaaS provider in San Mateo, California

Being able to provision and manage user identities from a single location across a range of applications is critical, especially for companies that have never been in the software-providing business before and don’t view their IT as a primary product, he says.

So remember you don’t want to lose the capex on that expensive software solution you bought a few years ago, find out if your existing solutions can work hand in hand with the cloud based offering. And will these solutions be able to communicate and forward information between the varying platforms successfully ?

In the next article, we’ll consider the underlying security required as basis of this service.

Tips on choosing IT Management solutions

Here are 3 high-level tips on choosing solutions for your IT Management.   These are aimed at the not-so-versed IT manager, senior manager, business owner or entrepreneur looking to expand his business and with it establish a more mature IT environment…

1.       Start by defining or at least understanding [fully] what the business or IT process is.   If you don’t understand the process – you can’t properly identify the broader problem and how that problem can potentially be solved. In the world of IT (or IT Management), make sure you’re working according to some model and broader vision – whether that be by adopting an FCAPS model, the Meta Group model for E/DSM, your own proprietary model or simply by aligning to ITIL guidelines for managing your processes.  Whatever your preference, you have to work towards a model.

2.       Choose software or solution components that will contribute to the solution you intend to adopt.  Choosing a solution is not just about choosing a good piece of software, hardware or service.   You must take some time to understand the vendor and supplier of choice.   You should take into consideration their culture, their success (and reputation) in the market, satisfaction of existing customers and whether they could get maximum value from solutions they’ve purchased.   You should look at how the local partners are empowered to support you, how willing they are to understand your needs and grow with you.   Most importantly, choose a partner that will support you through the tough times, a partner that’s knowledgeable and can give you the appropriate advise, a partner that puts your interests before his (i.e. your business objectives) because he realizes that he’ll only be successful if your business is successful.    When making your buying decision – consider all these aspects – and spend time developing a relationship so that you can actually gain an understanding of these aspects.

3.       Lastly, it’s important to consider what your definition of a solution is.  Many people have a wrong perception – partly due to vendors selling “solutions” when all they’re selling is software or hardware.   Ask yourself “when is a solution a solution?”.   A solution is note something that comes in a box.  It’s not something you buy and now have to wonder what you’re going to do with it.  You only have a solution when the software, hardware, service and whatever else you purchase is fully implemented, integrated, supported and utilized (i.e. users are empowered and educated), and when it is adding maximum value according to your original definition of the problem that needed to be solved.

To sum this up, a solution must support a process that solves a business problem, it must be integrated into existing systems and you should have a partner supporting you to gain maximum value from your investment so that you can focus your efforts on your own business and your customers’ businesses.

The direct benefits

So the technology is great and the concepts are fresh, but what are the direct benefits to our customers if they use our services/solutions?

Here’s a concise list of real benefits:

Benefit No 1:    Simplification, simplification, simplification…..

This is perhaps a bit of an abused cliche, but with our solutions – your life as a CIO or CTO, IT director, IT manager, IT Engineer, service desk administrator or operator or even just an IT user – becomes simpler, more efficient and easier on a daily basis.  The typical IT environment has become so complex and all the systems needed to monitor and manage the infrastructure and associated services associated – along with the governing processes (i.e. ITIL) have resulted in a huge jumble of integrated point solutions and complex software models and architectures.
We’ve taken a fresh approach that has enabled us to essentially replace the entire management layer (Enterprise Systems Management + IT Service Management) with a simple integration of two of the most innovative and practical solutions to enter the IT management space in decades.  (Service-now.com for ITSM and Monolith Software for ESM).   Add to the fresh technical approach the fact that these solutions are offered as a service, and a huge amount of effort and skills required for [essentially] non-core services are taken off your shoulders.

Benefit No 2:   Cost savings…

(I might as well say cliche no 2.)  As a direct result of the simplification explained above – huge cost savings can be had.  First of all, ALL of the solutions that we offer as Marutech fall into the category of:  “On Demand” or “Software as a Service” or “Cloud Computing” or “Managed Service” or “Subscriptions” or “Off Balance Sheet”  – choose your buzz-word (carefully, as there’s often strong internal resistance to over-used buzz-words in the market), but we do not sell you software licenses and hardware that you need to worry about.   Everything we do is focused on zero capital expenditure (CAPEX) while drastically optimizing your long-term operational costs (or OPEX).   But besides that, there’s the direct cost savings achieved due to lower operational overhead, fewer complexities, increased productivity and performance, lower maintenance costs, fewer contractors and specialist skills, etc…   These result in real cost savings…

Benefit No 3:  Improved Customer Service, Performance, Morale, Productivity, etc.
Quite incredibly – the customers that have migrated from their legacy systems to Service-now.com and/or Monolith-Software are experiencing such elation and enthusiasm with their decisions that the only people we see moaning and groaning about these technologies are the (non-customer) late adopters and bigots that can’t let go of the empires they’ve built using the legacy solutions…  Virtually every customer I know of that has made the move, have re-energized teams, staff and particular managers and of course improved customer service and productivity levels. They all seem to be in jovial moods with huge weights being lifted from their shoulders since ditching the legacy systems.   Every single one of them seems to be eager to share the great success stories…

I could ramble on and get into a lot of detail, but at a high level – these 3 benefits really stand out as the primary impacting benefits on customers that have adopted either of our 2 core solutions.

Virtualisation and Cloud – How do they Fit ?

“Virtualisation and Cloud – How do they Fit ?”

At the 2010 VMWorld held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, VMware unveiled a new approach to ‘Cloud Computing’ that enables businesses and larger enterprises who already have virtualized infrastructures, to shift some of their IT operations to an ISP’s cloud service offering.

The new service, Computing as a Service (CaaS) enabled by VMware vCloud Datacentre, is currently in field trials. Enterprises can use this hybrid service without having to rewrite applications that operate on VMware, using their current modes of operation, according to the vendor.

“It is intended to lower some of the barriers to adoption of cloud computing.” says Joe Crawford, executive director of IT solutions. “VMware customers will be interested in this functionality. There are hundreds of thousands of customers who use VMware today, and they can now use a cloud-based solution using the same tool set and same knowledge base”

For some ‘Virtualization’ and ‘Cloud Computing’ is still a grey area, so let’s try to clarify this a bit.

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resource, in essence it is scaling down from a ‘one server, one application’ model to ‘one server, multiple servers and multiple applications’ model. A number of customers have used this model to scale down massive power hungry data centres to run on a few high capacity servers. With an array of benefits.

Whereas ‘Cloud Computing’ is Internet based computing, it is also a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories – Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

This new service is ground-breaking for VMware, a company that has factored heavily in the service provider community’s move to cloud computing. VMware have started to engage with ISP’s to offer this cloud based solution, built on the customers’ requirements.

The new service also promises security for applications shifted onto the cloud-based architecture.

One immediate area of appeal is disaster recovery and business continuity, Joe Crawford, executive director of IT solutions says, “as enterprises look for network-based computing options that enable them to stay in business in the face of natural or man-made disasters or service interruptions. In addition, the CaaS offering will give businesses the ability to add or subtract computing resources as needed, paying for what they use rather than investing capital in computing power that sits idle during slower times.

InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) has been selected to trial the field tests for this service, using cloud computing to handle higher booking activity during peak travel times,  and with the upcoming to holiday season, they are likely to need extra capacity until the off season.

With this service, you can have variable workloads hosted by the service provider as opposed to using your own resources, so if you require a higher capacity it is as simple as putting through a request.

So moving forward we can see infrastructures scaling down through virtualized environments and them saving money, by only paying for what they use. We have a high expectancy from the field trials and hope within the next year we can see our local ISP’s adopting a CaaS model driving forward with VMware at the helm.

SaaS not easy for everyone

The terms “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Service” have been flying around in IT circles for a while now, and have become a local buzz word, so much so we even having conferences based on these buzz words. Yet a number of people still do not understand what the core of Cloud Computing / SaaS is supposed to deliver ?

In short, Cloud Computing is simply to access shared resources, software over the internet, and Software as a Service (SaaS) to make that software available to customers via the same channel and thereby the vendor or supplier, charges a type of a leasing fee (depending on the vendors business model) for utilizing their software or resources.  [Edit: Of course - this model has at its core - the ability to scale massively and on demand - something that not all 'legacy' vendors are able to do.  BC]

The conceptual idea of selling software has become a model of the past, most companies are moving to a software as a service model allowing their services and software to be made available to customers at a fraction of the cost while they still maintain the ownership of the software.  [Edit: unfortunately not always at a fraction of the cost, but the long term TCO is generally considerably lower due to the simplified approach.  BC]

This has obviously changed the strategy and operations for the smaller to medium size vendors who have been more flexible in growing their own market share within the SaaS business model.

But this does put strain on the larger [legacy] vendors who do not have the flexibility of the smaller [younger - SaaS specific] companies, they have to incorporate their current business model and build that into a Cloud-based / SaaS model moving forward, which has kept a number of BA’s up late at night trying to figure out how to move this large ship with fixed processes and models to a flexible Cloud Based customer centric solution. For some local and international companies this is still a slow and difficult transition.

OPNET is a company that we have partnered with for a number of years, and are certainly a leader in the APM space.  They too are in the process of slowly changing their business model within the Network and Application Performance arena to ensure that they move forward with the changing trend in IT [edit - but as mentioned above - this isn't always easy. BC].

OPNET was founded in 1986 by brothers Mark and Alain Cohen, have a number of software packages in three categories of application and network concerns. Application Performance Management, Network Engineering, Operations, and Planning and Network R&D.

Its flagship product is APM (Application Performance Management) suite, which consists of three solutions: ACE Live, ACE Analyst, and Panorama.

ACE Live performs network monitoring, measurement, and detection of SLA violations. It gathers data about application performance, resource utilization, route quality, and other metrics and monitors network flows through passive Ethernet connections. It integrates seamlessly with ACE Analyst, which performs analysis of network packet traces, intermittent application problems, and other data in order to troubleshoot application performance problems.

Panorama does transaction tracing within the Java and .NET platforms and uses correlation technology and a statistical correlation engine to detect patterns in metrics and events. It monitors metrics with established ranges for normal behaviour and identifies deviations based on how far from normal they are.

OPNET’s products are slowing moving towards a SaaS model, but this will take some time, although the company can install its products on site for a customer and operate them on the customer’s behalf, they are still a way off from having a truly Cloud Based / SaaS offering.   [Edit - Unfortunately - APM type products just don't lend themselves to SaaS that easily, and Alain's comments below reflect this dilemma. BC]

Alain Cohen CTO of OPNET :

“For the most part, our solutions need to operate in the environment where the business transactions are processed and the network traffic is present,”

“They’re processing a lot of data, so to transfer it across the Internet would not be the best approach, and some of our solutions just wouldn’t work well that way, particularly in some aspects of reporting.”

So for a number of larger well know vendors who are trying to incorporate the SaaS model into their business, it will definitely be a slow and painful process.

For the immediate future Cohen says “OPNET’s mission is to keep looking for new levels of capability for application performance management. It will search for new ways to give all levels of IT staff visibility into the performance they’re getting and to expand the software’s analysis and troubleshooting to every nook and cranny of the IT environment”.

Marutech ad iWeek

Take a look at our latest full-page add that featured in the ITWeb iWeek 11 August publication… (inside back cover).

Take a look!

The message is hopefully quite clear.  The world is changing, and if you’re not changing with it – you’ll end up as a fossil.